Album Review: Messiah'el Bey - The Nuyorican Jazz Experience

Messiah’el Bey delivers his new album, The Nuyorican Jazz Experience, that makes for a fascinating listen. The pleasure of this kind of project comes from the way it invites active listening as a means of interpretation. and the audience gets to experience fresh ideas that sees the artist slipping between diverse genres and songwriting modes.

Originally from Hempstead, Long Island, Messiah’el Bey, who is popularly known by his pseudonym Warlock Asylum, has developed his skill as an author, composer, electronic musician, DJ, filmmaker, music producer, and poet. Nonetheless, his varied interests in jazz, rock, and other styles has allowed him to find new ways of making different sounds interact together. And when all his influences click into place, the result is a little bit of everything else, in any genre.

The Nuyorican Jazz Experience covers a lot of ground with a limited vocabulary. Rendered with instruments such as the saxophone, drums, and the occasional vocals, Messiah’el Bey gives way for his compositions to be diverse and rhythmically ambitious. He’s not only leveraging jazz, but a broader sonic lexicon including Caribbean soca such as on the track, “Symphony of the Proud Garifuna.”

Going by the title, Messiah’el Bey finds a way to converse between genres and generations. This adds another dimension to the artist’s relationship with Jazz music, placing him among the players whose work he aims to deconstruct and absorb inspiration from.

According to the Internet, the Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms “New York” and “Puerto Rican” and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Ricans located in or around New York City, or of their descendants (especially those raised or still living in the New York area).

The Nuyoricans are a special experience in the immigration history of the city of New York such that they started The Nuyorican movement, which was a tradition of poets, writers, artists, and musicians whose work spoke to the social, political, and economic issues Puerto Ricans faced in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s.

This album is an ode to Nuyorican culture, but also Garifuna peoples, and African Americans (Symphony of the Proud Garifuna-track 5) of which Messiah’el Bey owes ancestral ties, and for him The Nuyorican Jazz Experience feels like a passionate achievement, but it is also a testament to his talent as a composer and musician. The pileup of melody often feels luxuriously imaginative, instead of complicated for its own sake.

Expansive instrumental sections of songs sees Messiah’el Bey skillfully add and detract instruments while building the grand groove of it all. He’s most effective when he transposes melodic concepts to instruments this way, and plays in sweetly curving licks before fracturing into staccato blurts.

Overall, the effect is grandeur as the artist aims to attack each song from as many angles as manageable while keeping the mood relaxed and enjoyable. For fans of the music genre, The Nuyorican Jazz Experience is an exhilarating and highly rewarding album that showcases Messiah’el Bey’s ability to translate culture into melody.